Then something changed. Suddenly Merritt was aware of an overpowering odor. His eyes narrowed behind his goggles. The sprinklers were no longer spraying water.
He looked to his men and shouted, “Gasoline!”
Before they could turn and run, a high-precision motor whirred in the distant cupola tower. A deep choom sound issued from it, and the last thing Merritt saw through his goggles was a blinding green flare arcing over the distance between him and the tower.
The rolling fireball lit up the sky for a mile around. Its dull roar echoed off the side of the trailer, and the orange light illuminated three hundred horrified faces. Trear still held the radio in his hand. He stood paralyzed as shrieks of agony came over the radio channel. All around him men raced into action—or anarchy, it was hard to tell.
“Get the fire trucks over there!”
“Ambulance! Bring up an ambulance!”
“We’ve got agents down!”
The fireball climbed to the sky, and in its stark light Trear could see the lawn sprinklers surrounding it still running. They were spraying water—to contain the fire in the precise spot where the HRT unit had infiltrated. Trear felt like he was watching something on TV. It had the surreal feeling of the impossible. People were grabbing him, shouting at him. He couldn’t take his eyes off the raging fire and the wildly thrashing dark forms dancing in the flames like damned souls—then falling. The ten-ton truck was burning like a Texas A&M bonfire.
Someone shouted in his ear about radio transmissions, and Trear absently looked down at the radio in his hand. Only static hissed out of it now. That’s when it happened.
Suddenly all the lights went on in Sobol’s mansion, glowing with a frightful intensity. Then lights kicked back on all across the estate. An audible groan ran through the ranks of the besieging agents.
Trear snapped out of it and shoved the now useless radio into another agent’s hands. “Get to cover! Everybody get to cover!”
The pain (because it must have been pain) was white noise that Merritt had no time for. On the imaginary control board in his mind, every light was flashing red. He ran as only men on fire can run, yanking his Nomex balaclava up to cover his mouth. The whole world had turned into the surface of the sun. He resisted the panic-stricken need to breathe the superheated air. To breathe was to die.
But then it turned dark again—the bright glow beyond his clenched eyelids had gone away. Had the night vision goggles failed? Probably. But he’d have to open his eyes to find out, and he wasn’t ready for that. But the heat was gone—and now there was only cold. His entire body tingled. It was almost pleasant. Experience told him that, in combat, tingling sensations meant you had just been seriously injured.
Merritt staggered on blindly. Finally he stopped and tore off his night vision goggles and opened his eyes. Instantly he was blinded by cold water spraying into his face. It felt wonderful. He smelled a combination of gasoline, burnt flesh, melted plastic, and hot metal. He turned in place dizzily—feeling shock creep up on him. He stood in a manicured section of lawn right next to a rising mushroom of orange flame fifty feet tall. The cold water spraying over him made it tolerable to be this close. His men were in those flames somewhere.
He reached for his bone mic, melted against his cheek. “Waucheuer! Reese! Littleton! Report! Kirkson! Engels! Report!” The microphone pulled off in his hands. His earphones were dead under his Kevlar helmet.
His men were gone. All gone.
Merritt was numb. He spun in place to orient himself and saw the mansion blazing white light a hundred feet farther on. He held his arm up and saw that the stock of his MP-5 had melted onto the back of his sleeve. His nylon web belt containing ammunition clips had melted into his jumpsuit and Kevlar body armor. He wasn’t sure whether he was badly injured, but his temper was beginning to flare. He decided to go with it.
Merritt grabbed the gun’s barrel with his left hand and wrenched the twisted mass free from his arm. The Nomex appeared to have protected him from the worst of it, but he felt the confused buzzing in his nerve endings that was the neurological equivalent of “Please Stand By For Pain….”
Merritt started running, not toward the perimeter wall and safety, but toward the mansion. He raced for the fenced-in pool area and a set of white French doors with polished brass handles—its windows blazing light. His eyes never left it as he leapt over stone benches and herb gardens.
Around him, in the sprinkler wash, he smelled gasoline again, and he heard the whoosh of flames racing to overtake him, but he outran it and stayed in the cool clear water that served as a buffer against the flames reaching the house.
As he ran, Merritt clutched at his back for the sawed-off shotgun strapped there. He was still tugging on its rubberized pistol grip, trying to free it from the melted mass of his web belt, when he kicked in the wooden pool gate. Metal gate hardware clattered across the paving stones—but he was already smashing through a field of teak wood patio chairs and flipping tables in his quest for the French doors. Almost there. He was vaguely aware of spotlights focusing on him from the house, but he didn’t give a damn what Sobol was up to. He might drop dead once he got there, but he was getting inside that house.
He whipped out his Mark V knife and slashed the melted bits of the web belt from the shotgun. To save time he hurled the knife ahead, where it stuck quivering in the door frame. He drew the Remington 870 shotgun into his gloved hands and chambered a round with a satisfying click-clack.
Merritt hit the door hard with his booted foot—and damn near shattered his shinbone. His forward momentum sent him hurtling into the door, where his knee came up into his mouth—driving a sharp nail of pain straight to the center of his skull. He staggered back and reflexively wiped the back of his glove across his mouth. It came back covered with blood. His front teeth felt loose.
Doesn’t matter.
Merritt leveled the shotgun at the door handles and blasted a foot-wide hole in their place. He chambered another breaching round and quickly blasted similar holes at the top and bottom where the doors met—the most likely spot for reinforcing bolts.
Hundreds of yards away, the FBI camp was pandemonium. Agents and police scrambled to gather rescue gear while others scrambled to order no one to go anywhere near the site of the attack. It was a disorganized mess. Somewhere in the chaos Trear heard distant shotgun blasts.
He shouted, “Who’s shooting? Decker, order them to cease fire!”
“Com is down.”
Merritt rammed his shoulder into the French doors, bashing them in. He stumbled into a neo-mission-style entertainment room with wide-plank wooden floors. There was a sunken area of sectional sofas in front of a large plasma screen television. The lights here blazed brilliantly, practically blinding him. Nonetheless he craned his neck and weaved from side to side. He knew what he had to do.
The bomb disposal team was taken out by weaponized acoustics, and he wasn’t going to let that happen to him. Merritt raised his shotgun and noticed half a dozen different sensors spaced along the ceiling over each wall—behind the brilliant lights.
A clear and commanding voice called from the doorway leading farther into the house. “You don’t belong here!”
Merritt’s response came out reflexively. “Fuck you, Sobol.”
Merritt heard footsteps approaching him over the wooden floor. It was uncanny. There was definitely the sense that someone was there. A change in the echoes of the room. That’s when Merritt felt as much as heard the deepest sound he’d ever experienced pass over and through him. The nearby coffee table started vibrating so badly that the glass panels fell out of it.